Various dispensers of the above-indicated kind have been described in the literature. Often, these dispensers are used as wall-mounted dosing dispensers including a flexible liquid soap containing storage vessel, which dispense aliquots of said liquid soap product when manually squeezing the bottle.
For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,457,453 discloses an oval squeezable container assembly including a self-sealing container closure, having a rotatable discharge device mounted over the mouth of the container. The configuration of said container assembly is such that the container can be placed in a non-operational mode by rotating the discharge device. In view of this configuration, it cannot be excluded that pilfering may occur when a container assembly proposed by U.S. Pat. No. 4,457,453 is used as a dosing dispenser.
This problem of pilfering is addressed by EP-A-530,789, which document discloses a dosing dispenser for liquid soap material, having an approximately C-shaped holder releasably retaining between its two free end zones a storage vessel, whereby the holder has at the lower of the two free end zones a holding sleeve which locally embraces the storage vessel, is detachably connected to the holder and is secured thereto by means of a safeguard to prevent pilfering.
This dispenser configuration prevents that undesired manipulation with the contents of the storage vessel can occur. As a result of this and since the storage vessel in this dosing dispenser is connected to a discharge device containing a delivery valve thus forming a replaceable refill unit, high hygienic standards can be met with this dosing dispenser.
However, the user friendliness of this dosing dispenser leaves room for improvement. When the refill unit needs to be replaced several handling steps need to be carried out:
to place the holding sleeve around the new refill unit; PA1 to position the bottom of the storage vessel into the top part of the C-shaped holder; and PA1 to connect the holding sleeve to the holder.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a dosing dispenser having a considerably improved user friendliness. It is a further object of the invention to provide a dosing dispenser which is suitable for use with storage vessels of widely varying height, shape and volume.
It has now been surprisingly found that these and other objects can be achieved when a dosing dispenser according to the present invention is used.